Rapid Shift

France is paving more than 600 miles of road with solar panels: In 5 years, France hopes the panels will supply power to 5 million people

France is paving more than 600 miles of road with solar panels: In 5 years, France hopes the panels will supply power to 5 million people

(COLAS/Joachim Bertrand)

France’s minister of Ecology and Energy announced that the country will pave 621 miles of road with solar panels over the next five years, with the goal of providing cheap, renewable energy to five million people.

Called “the Wattway,” the roads will be built in collaboration with the French road-building company Colas and the National Institute of Solar Energy. The company spent the last five years developing solar panels that are only about a quarter of an inch thick and are hardy enough to stand up to heavy highway traffic without breaking or making the roads more slippery, David Rogers reports for Global Construction Review. The panels are also designed so that they can be installed directly on top of existing roadways, making them relatively cheap and easy to install without having to tear up any infrastructure.

“There is no need to rebuild infrastructure,” Colas CEO Hervé Le Bouc told Myriam Chauvot for the French magazine Les Echoes in 2015. “At Chambéry and Grenoble, was tested successfully on Wattway a cycle of 1 million vehicles, or 20 years of normal traffic a road, and the surface does not move.”

The panels are made out of a thin polycrystalline silicon film and coated in a layer of resin to strengthen them and make them less slippery. Because the panels are so thin, they can adapt to small changes in the surface of pavement due to temperature shifts and are sealed tightly against the weather, Fiona MacDonald reports for ScienceAlert. According to Colas, the panels are even snowplow-proof, although plows need to be a little more cautious so as not to rip the panels off the ground.

For many environmentalists, paving roadways with solar panels sounds like a great idea. Colas says that 215 square feet of Wattway will provide enough energy to power a single French home (aside from heating), but some researchers are still skeptical that solar roadways will ever be efficient and cost-effective enough to compete with regular rooftop solar panels, MacDonald writes.

It will be difficult for photovoltaic glass to compete against the much cheaper asphalt, for example, and rooftop panels are better placed to get the best possible sunlight, researcher Andrew Thomson wrote for The Conversation. In addition, he writes, if solar roadways prove to be more slippery than traditional roadways, safety concerns could kill the burgeoning technology, regardless of how much power they may put out.

For now, French authorities are going ahead with the project, and will start laying down segments of Wattway this coming spring.